UK self-employment - Statistics & Facts

There were 4.39 million self-employed workers in the United Kingdom in 2023, down from a peak of over five million in early 2020. Although self-employment was growing at a fairly consistent pace before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduced self-employment in the UK, falling by around 782,000 workers in one year. While there has been a recent uptick since January 2022, self-employment in the UK has struggled to recover, and it will likely be some time before self-employment fully recovers from the pandemic.

What type of workers are self-employed in the UK?

Through self-employed workers perform a variety of different jobs, the most common industry sector as of 2022 was in construction, which had approximately 799,000 workers. Although there are more self-employed men than self-employed women, the gap between the two has narrowed in recent years. As of 2023, there were approximately 2.79 million self-employed men, and 1.6 million women, a gap of around 1.19 million, compared with 1.67 million in 1992. Self-employed workers were also more likely to work full-time, rather than part-time, with around 2.88 million full-time workers to 1.5 million part-time ones. Self-employed workers are however, more likely to work longer hours than the wider workforce, with around one in five of them working more than 45 hours a week, compared with 14.9 percent of people in employment.

Impact of COVID-19

As seen in the figures mentioned above, self-employment in the UK has struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels. Just as huge numbers of workers were supported by the government's furlough scheme at the time, the UK government also introduced a similar scheme for self-employed workers. Through the self-employment income support scheme, approximately 2.7 million self-employed workers received government financial assistance between May and July 2020. This was followed by a second scheme that had 2.4 million workers on it, and ran from September to November 2020, and a third one with 2.19 workers between December 2020 and January 2021. The cost of these three schemes to the UK government was approximately 7.8 billion pounds for the first tranche, 5.9 billion pounds for the second, and 6.2 billion pounds for the last one. Despite this assistance, self-employment evidently suffered a blow during this time period, and although self-employment bankruptcies remained relatively low during the subsequent period they has been a slight uptick in early 2023.
This text provides general information. Statista assumes no liability for the information given being complete or correct. Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date data than referenced in the text.
Published by D. Clark, Jan 10, 2024

Key insights

Number of self-employed workers in the UK
4.24m
Share of UK workforce that are self-employed
13%
Self-employment contribution to UK economy
278bn GBP
Get more insights

Editor’s Picks Current statistics on this topic

Number of self-employed workers in the United Kingdom from 2nd quarter 1992 to 4th quarter 2023, by gender (in 1,000s)

Employment

Number of self-employed workers in the UK 1992-2023, by gender

Number of self-employed workers in the United Kingdom as of 1st quarter 2022, by region (in 1,000s)

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Number of self-employed workers in the UK 2022, by region

Usual weekly hours of work for self-employed people in the United Kingdom from 1st quarter 1995 to 4th quarter 2023, by weekly hours

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Usual weekly hours of work for the self-employed in the UK 1995-2023, by weekly hours

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